WHEELING, West Va. — If you want a feel for Democratic desperation these days, look no further than panhandle West Virginia, crammed between Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Democrats feel crushed between their president and a populist uprising.

Democratic Sen. John Rockefeller and the man he wants to join him in the upper chamber, Gov. Joe Manchin, spent Saturday night pleading with a small conclave of Democrats here to wrangle every breathing body on their reliable-voter lists — to overcome a huge enthusiasm gap with the GOP.

“We either vote or we lose. … Act from fear,” Rockefeller told the Ohio County Democratic Women's Club Northern Regional Jefferson Jackson Dinner at the McLure Hotel on Saturday night.

“If we are not making people who are Democrats — but who are at this point sufficiently unhappy that they don’t want to — go out and vote, then we are talking about the wrong things,” he told the room, 13 tables set with plates of palm salad and 3-inch buttons commemorating the late Sen. Robert Byrd.

Ten tables were occupied, three were empty.

“I talked this afternoon with Chuck Schumer, who is one of the leadership of the Democratic Party, and he said. ‘Look, the Senate is going to be Democrat or Republican based on what happens in West Virginia,’” added Rockefeller.

Over the past few days, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has begun robo-calling 30,000 of the state’s 665,000 Democrats “who have voted in recent years … but until this point had not shown an instinct to go vote because of their frustration” in 2010, the senator said.

The state of 1.8 million has always been regarded as a quirky microcosm of national trends, and this year is no different.

West Virginia’s Democrats enjoy a 2-to-1 registration advantage. But the state has been reliably Republican in presidential elections since Bill Clinton left office. And the wave of anger about the economy is lapping over, just as it has in neighboring eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

Even this small dinner attracted about a dozen noisy tea partiers outside, who waved American flags, chanted and politely directed Democrats to the parking garage adjacent to the hotel.

The popular Manchin, who had every reason to expect a double-digit win, is in the fight of his political life. He is locked in a tight race against perennial also-ran Republican John Raese, who has run ads labeling him President Barack Obama’s “rubber stamp.”

“We just can’t rely on the independents and moderate Republicans, this time … we’ve got to get our people out to have a chance,” he told a reporter.

Manchin, wearing a sports shirt under a suit jacket — he’d just presided over a bungee-jumping contest halfway across the state — told the audience, “I want Barack Obama to be the best president” in U.S. history.

But he also said, “I wanted to George W. Bush to be the best president we’ve ever had.”

Later, Manchin — a towering 63-year-old who bears a striking resemblance to former Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann — laughed off an ad he’d run in which he fires a bullet through the Democrats cap-and-trade bill, reviled in coal country.

“Hey, everybody around here shoots guns,” he said when asked if it was a good idea.

Rockefeller wasn’t so sure.

“I didn’t see it, and I probably would not have done it myself,” he told POLITICO. “But everybody’s talking about it. The polls went up. Is that a good comment about America? Probably not. But if it helps us control the Senate and Joe gets in there, I’m all for it.”